UV Letters

Every time I read an article about campus dining, I think about this segment of the old Yale promo video. In fact, this quarter-century-old loopy video has proven to be a prism through which my former roommates and I view college...

While I travel a lot, I'm fairly indiscriminate when it comes to selecting airlines. I always select the lowest fare as I have frequent flier programs everywhere. Or so I thought. Last week I flew from Minneapolis to L.A. on an unfamiliar airline: Sun Country. The experience was equally unfamiliar. For the first time in months I stretched out in an empty...

In college, my roommates and I did many things for which we had little interest in taking responsibility. Top of mind: Leaving a hulking old refrigerator in the middle of Old Campus, trying to get the School of Organization and Management to...

One of the more colorful characters from my college days was a student from Japan named Shohei who preferred to be known as Speed. Among his most famous exploits: projecting the Bat Signal onto Harkness Tower; and - previously - betting and losing his high school...

My college roommate Chris was notorious for a few things. Chris looked vaguely Nordic and enjoyed putting on a Viking helmet, taking off all his clothes, and venturing out to Cross Campus Lawn to ask unwitting pedestrians if they knew where the German Club was meeting. He was also renowned for going to great...

I was 15 when I first understood the importance of training. I'd been hired at a Toronto Baskin Robbins and after a few weeks was deemed a sufficiently reliable scooper that franchise owner Mr. Pirani gladly accepted my offer to refer two of my younger brothers for employment.

In my experience, telling someone they're getting something for free leads to problems. My first job out of college was in management consulting where I spent the majority of my tenure at one of the old "music clubs" that offered 12 CDs for a penny. This offer yielded two distinct forms of bad...

It's funny how weird things seem normal when you grow up with them. Toronto in the 70s and 80s was no exception. Like only being able to buy beer from a government store that wouldn't have been out of place in the Soviet Union. Like the fact that two of the eight teams in the Canadian Football League shared...

My wife Yahlin and I got married where we'd met nearly a dozen years earlier: college. Because we were living in New York and both working full-time, we sought help from a New Haven theatre set designer who moonlighted as a wedding planner. Or rather, Yahlin...